Pharmacogenomics - PhD and honours Projects - Identification of bone metastasis genes in a xenograft model of experimental breast cancer
Identification of bone metastasis genes in a xenograft model of experimental breast cancer
Project Type
PhD
Summary
Bone is a common site of breast cancer metastasis causing high mortality. The honours project will focus on the analysis of a specific human breast cell line and a variant subline which have demonstrated different metastatic ability when grown as xenografts in immunocomprimised mice. Of particular interest is that the variant cell line, unlike the parental line, has demonstrated an ability to metastasis to bone when seeded intra-arterially. The major tool to be employed in this study is microarray gene expression analysis. The guiding hypotheses being that differential expression of specific genes or gene classes are responsible for the different metastatic phenotype. The student will then validate differential expression (assessing all xenograft samples) using an alternative methodology. The current preferred approach in the laboratory is SYBR GREEN based qRT-PCR. A very important component of the study will be for the student to assess the literature to place their findings (genes) in context with what is known about the metastasis process. Mining the emerging gene expression databases (maintained by the Stanford Group and the National Institutes of Health) may also be necessary to develop a model for the role of identified genes in the bone metastasis profile.